ABSTRACT
It is axiomatic that teachers need subject knowledge for teaching. Of course: how else could they be teachers? However subject knowledge means different things to different people, and it is important to determine exactly what is meant by subject knowledge. The White Paper Teaching Quality (DES 1983) can be seen as the key document initiating concern over the importance of teachers’ subject knowledge. The Council for the Accreditation of Teacher Education (CATE) was set up in 1984, as ordered in the government Circular 3/84 (DES 1984) and reconstituted in 1989 (Circular 24/89, DES 1989b); in their criteria there was a more elaborated emphasis on subject study. The underlying assumption in these criteria was that a student’s mastery of a subject and its application promotes effective teaching, and high-quality learning. The importance of subject knowledge in the eyes of government officials was further strengthened by publications such as Lawlor’s (1990) pamphlet, issued by the Centre for Policy Studies, a right-wing think tank. In this document, she pointed out that: ‘It was with the object of placing the mastery of the subject at the heart of the teacher’s training, as the first prerequisite for good teaching’ that the recent proposals to reform teacher training were introduced. For Lawlor, subject mastery was all-important. But for all her emphasis on subject study, nowhere in the pamphlet is there any indication of what is meant by subject knowledge, or subject mastery. The terms ‘deep knowledge of the subject’ and ‘mastery of the subject’ are not explored.
